Tag: trauma

Charles Figley was a US Marine who signed up for service in the Vietnam War to “accelerate my progression toward being considered a man.” But after his tour of duty he ended up as veteran protesting against the war, stunned by the psychological impact on himself and his fellow soldiers.

He began to investigate the symptoms of his fellow veterans and, along with other anti-war psychologists and psychiatrists, proposed a disorder called “post-Vietnam syndrome” where veterans carried emotions of the war with them despite being safely back on US soil. In fact, various forms of combat stress had been recorded during previous wars, from “disordered action of the heart” diagnosed in the Boer Wars to the dramatic symptoms of shell shock and war neurosis from the First World War.

The concept caught on and appeared, in a demilitarised form, as “post-traumatic stress disorder,” a mental illness where an earlier trauma causes the person to have a sense of current threat characterised by flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, avoidance of reminders, and anxiety.

And here lies the paradox. Researchers have noted that “PTSD is classified as an anxiety disorder. Within cognitive models, anxiety is a result of appraisals relating to impending threat. However, PTSD is a disorder in which the problem is a memory for an event that has already happened.” After all, if you feel threatened with good reason, almost by definition, this isn’t a mental illness.

So if someone remains in danger after a life-threatening incident, does the concept of “post-traumatic stress disorder” even make sense?